Update: NewLaw firm combo intends to halve corporates’ legal spend

For the first time, three luminaries who appear on Dialogue are featured in the same story by legendary Bob Ambrogi on the equally renowned Above the Law website.

Bob reports on the formation of ElevateNext, an innovative partnership designed to comply with the US’s ethical rules and enable those who are not lawyers to invest in the provision of technology-based and process-related services bundled with legal services to corporate law departments.

Mark Cohen, Jeff Carr and Liam Brown are some of those driving ElevateNext, a compound noun based on Elevate Services (founded by Liam, the Advisory Board of which is chaired by Mark) and NextLaw (a neologism first coined, I believe, by Jeff). Others include Patrick Lamb (co-founder of Valorem Law Group).

Read the whole story by Bob Ambrogi on ATL here. He leads off with the statement: ‘The longer-term goal of the collaboration is to build something that can be provided to other mid-market legal departments’. And I would add, not just in the US; this is needed everywhere.

When I first met Liam in Sydney at the start of Elevate Services’ barn-storming of Australia a few years ago he shared with me “I don’t worry about the obstacles that ethical rules and regulation pose; the market will always find a workaround within these constraints”. ElevateNext certainly looks like a clever workaround in the way it combines the proven talent of those behind it.

George Beaton